Orphan freed from a life behind Russian bars

Vanya was a bright, cheerful but disabled orphan who was fated to spend his
life 'bed-bound' in a Russian asylum. Alan Philps tells the remarkable story
of his 'miraculous' escape to a new life in the West.

It was a stifling Saturday morning in July 1996, with thunder clouds gathering overhead, as I turned off the Moscow-Kiev highway and on to a rutted track. Back in the Telegraph’s Moscow office was an article I had to finish by that afternoon. I cursed myself for giving in to my wife’s request: Sarah had been nagging me for months to write about a little boy called Vanya. A very special boy, apparently, who had somehow ended up in a mental asylum.

In the passenger seat was an earnest young Christian woman called Victoria whom I had never met before. She was to be my guide for the day, and was putting pressure on me. “You will write an article about Vanya, won’t you?” she said, with Russian directness. “I’ve tried everything to get him out of this place. I even pleaded with the director, but he kicked me out of his office. You’re Vanya’s last chance.”

The asylum turned out to be a huge barrack of a place, built around the ruins of a 17th-century church with branches growing out of the top of its crumbling steeple. The gates of the asylum were not even shut: there was nowhere for the inmates to run to. As we entered we saw men and women, their heads shaven, shuffling around a patch of wasteland.

Victoria led me along dark passages and up filthy concrete stairs until we stood before a locked door whose glass panel had been smashed. Victoria banged on the door. After 10 minutes the door opened a crack, and a hostile woman told us to go away. A stable smell hit us. Victoria stood her ground, and we edged inside.

Victoria opened another door. The stench – a fug of urine, excrement and unwashed children – made me gag. Over her shoulder I glimpsed rows of naked children on plastic mattresses behind high bars, like animals in cages. They were lying in puddles of piss and their own faeces. Some were immobile, others were rocking from side to side – some banging their heads against the sides of their cots. The child nearest the door was in a makeshift straitjacket, with his bottom in the air. The only sound was moaning. The door was slammed in my face.

A few minutes later Victoria appeared with a small child in her arms. He was too weak to raise his head from her shoulder. His eyes were dull. Where was the lively six-year-old that Sarah, who had worked at the house as a volunteer interpreter, had described to me? Victoria sat him at a table in a waiting room and began to feed him blackcurrants from a paper cup. Before my eyes the lifeless child began to perk up. Within half an hour he was kneeling by the window, watching the rain, calling me Uncle Alan and asking to be taken outside. There was nothing magic about the blackcurrants. All he had needed was human contact. He was no different from my son.

Until then I had always said orphanages were not newsworthy – people knew about Romania, there was nothing more to say. But here in front of me was a charming, intelligent child who was destined to spend his life in “permanent bed regime”. He would never leave the asylum, except to go to the morgue built into the crypt of the ruined church. How had this happened? I had to find out.

I discovered that Vanya was born in 1990. The following year, just as the communist USSR collapsed, his parents abandoned him and his elder sister Olga in their flat, leaving the neighbours to climb in through the window to rescue them. Olga was sent to an orphanage for older children. Vanya went to a “baby house”, an orphanage for the under-fives. The two would not speak again for 16 years.

Having been born premature, he did not meet his so-called milestones. When he turned two, the doctors put him in the room for the “incurables” – silent children who spent their lives in bed or lying in the communal playpen. One thing was certain: the fatalistic attitude of the staff would turn him into a disabled child.

His spirit refused to give in. Somehow he taught himself to speak. He persuaded the staff to let him sit at a table. He won the love of Valentina, his most elderly carer, the wife of a retired colonel in the Soviet army, who alone among the staff recognised him for the intelligent boy he was. She taught him the poems and songs of her youth, and brought him treats

But she was on duty only once in every four days. Three days out of four, no one spoke to him. He filled the empty hours listening to the staff gossiping, trying to make sense of an outside world he had never seen.

One day a volunteer came into his room. He engaged her in conversation and got her to promise to come back to see him. This was Victoria. He did the same to Sarah. At the age of four, he was already an accomplished networker, a skill that saved his life. He remembered people’s names and, on parting, he would say, “I’ll be thinking about you – a lot” – thus ensuring they would return.

In February 1996 the unthinkable happened. The medical-psychological commission from Psychiatric Hospital No 6 came to assess the children. Vanya was asked to identify pictures of objects – traffic lights, tigers and different types of trees – things he had never seen before, not even in picture books. He was asked about concepts – days of the week, the seasons – he was unfamiliar with. His ignorance, and the fact that he could not walk, led the commission to declare him an ineducable imbecile. This condemned him to spend his childhood in a mental asylum and, if he survived beyond 18, his adult life in an old folks’ home.

The baby house staff knew that being sent to one of these asylums was in many cases a death sentence. Sometimes it was only a matter of weeks before they received a phone call to say, “Your child has died.” But they felt powerless.

Vanya had screamed: “Don’t leave me here” when they took him to the asylum. The timid director of the baby house, who lived in fear of the authorities, was tormented by the memory of his pleading and felt shame for what she had allowed to happen. She begged Victoria and Sarah to rescue him.

I wrote an article about Vanya and the publicity it generated resulted in the closure of the children’s wing of the asylum. Vanya was returned to the baby house.

Vanya’s life then became a merry-go-round of hospitals and sanatoriums, as Sarah and Victoria kept him always one step ahead of the authorities who wanted to put him back on the conveyor belt to the asylum. At one stage it looked as if he might be adopted, but the Russian authorities were so obstructive that the would-be parents pulled out, just as Sarah and I were about to leave Moscow for a new posting in the Middle East.

We had never imagined that we would leave Russia without Vanya’s fate being resolved. At the last minute Sarah persuaded the founder of Russia’s first fostering project to take Vanya in, so at least he would be safe from the asylum. But it would take weeks to complete the paper-work.

On the morning of our departure, Sarah went to say goodbye to Vanya and found him sitting on a bench outside the baby house. An American couple emerged, carrying a little girl they had just adopted. They listened to Vanya’s story, fascinated and appalled. Their driver was holding the car door open for them and motioning for them to get inside, but they ignored him.

Among all the chance encounters of Vanya’s life, this one seemed of little consequence. But Vanya never missed a chance to recruit a useful friend. The couple put a notice in the newsletter of their parish in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about a Russian orphan who was “intelligent, cheerful and kind, but facing a bleak future”. That notice was read by a single woman, an educational psychologist named Paula Lahutsky – the surname coming from her grandfather who had emigrated from Russia in 1914 – and she became determined to adopt him.

Paula faced many obstacles: she was told a single woman could not adopt; she was told that Vanya had “disappeared” and she should find another child. She persevered. Then, when she arrived in Moscow to embrace her new son, she found herself thrust into a tug-of-love battle: Vanya was not in Moscow. His foster mother didn’t want to give him up, and had fled to the Caucasus, 1,000 miles to the south, with the boy she regarded as her son.

Not surprisingly, it was a very confused Vanya who got on a plane with Paula to fly to the US in August, 1999. Three months later he was speaking fluent English. His Russian was forgotten, consigned to some deep recess of his brain along with the memory of his stolen childhood.

Last October I had brunch with Vanya – or John as he is now known – in a restaurant off Park Avenue in New York. Over cappuccinos, we discussed his success in public speaking, the progress of the Yankees, and his drive to get to the top of the scouting movement. The boy who was condemned to permanent bed regime now spends nights under canvas and completes orienteering courses, despite his limited mobility.

We moved on to the subject of how he finally escaped the baby house and the unlikely series of occurrences which led to his coming to America. “A series of miracles,” he said, smiling through his perfect American teeth.

As far as I know John is the only child to have been consigned to the innermost circle of the Russian children’s gulag who has managed to escape abroad to make a new life. As he finishes high school, John hopes that the book we have written together – The Boy from Baby House 10 – will help those Russians who are trying to destroy this abiding legacy of Stalin. “It is my hope and prayer that this book will put an end to the evil system that locks children away behind high walls,” he says. “My dream is that, someday, all these institutions will be closed down. All children should live in families.”

When we started work on John’s story, a decade after my visit to the asylum, I assumed the children’s gulag was well on the way to being torn down. In 2006 Vladimir Putin, then President of Russia, called for a drastic reduction in the number of children in institutions. It is well known that young adults emerging from these institutions overwhelmingly fall into a life of drink, drugs, prostitution, prison and early death. Research shows that institutionalising infants severely retards their mental, social and even physical development. With Russia’s population in sharp decline, the country can ill afford to waste so many children.

Yet there are still 18,500 infants in Russian baby houses, a figure almost unchanged since John was born. According to official statistics quoted by the United Nations, 334,000 children aged up to 17 are in residential care, which is 25 times the rate in Britain. Some experts think these figures don’t tell the whole story. The charity EveryChild estimates that the real figure should be 570,000. So John’s story, which I foolishly doubted was newsworthy in 1996, is more relevant than ever.

? Alan Philps was Moscow Correspondent for the Telegraph between 1994 and 1998. His book, 'The Boy From Baby House 10’ is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p; call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk